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The individual owning this blog works for Oracle in Germany. The opinions expressed here are his own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual author, and neither Oracle nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.

Tuesday, August 19. 2008

I forgot to post the conclusion and the table of content when i published the JET tutorial some weeks ago. Okay ... here they are. This is a real long tutorial. 16 parts in total - the longest tutorial so far:

Tuesday, August 19. 2008

JET and Jumpstart are incredible powerful tools to ease the installation of your solaris systems. You can install your systems via network, configure and customize them. With tools like Jumpstart FLASH itīs easy to clone systems for large computing cluster.

Even when you have only a few systems, itīs a good practice to install you systems by a Jumpstart server. A bare metal recovery of your system is much easier, you can use a common template to setup your system and beside the hard disk space the jumpstart server needs only resources at the moment of the installation.

Friday, July 4. 2008

As i told you before much of the configuration takes place after the installation executed by the orignal Jumpstart mechanism. We used several modules of the JET toolkit so far, thus this is a good moment to do a deep dive into the process that takes place after the normal Jumpstart installation.

Friday, July 4. 2008

Itīs a best practice to harden a system before you place it into your production network to reduce possible attack vectors. Sun developed the Solaris Security Toolkit for this task to collect all the knowledge about hardening Solaris in a tool thats simple to use. Iīve wrote already about the usage of the toolkit in another installment of the LessKnownSolarisFeatures series.

It would be really neat to have an automatized hardening of new systems. The Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit can do exactly this with the help of JASS module.

Friday, July 4. 2008

Okay, in enterprise computing you wouldnīt use a system without redundant boot disks (at least, when you havenīt an application that can survive a loss of computing nodes without a problem). So it would be nice to automatically configure a mirror of the boot disks with the Solaris Volume Manager. I assume in the following part, that you have a working knowledge with the SVM. When this not the case, it isnīt really a big problem, as this part it somewhat selfexplaining when you are aware of the concept of RAID.

Friday, July 4. 2008

Okay, now weīve done a basic installation. But mostly we do a standard set of customizations on every system we touch, like installing a few essential tools or integrating the actual recommended patch cluster. So we want to polish the standard installation a little bit. We will extend a basic Solaris 10 Update 5 installation with the following items:

Friday, July 4. 2008

At first we will do a really basic install. No tricks, just the pure operating system. Nevertheless this part will be a little bit longer as i will do a technical deep-dive into the process of installation in this example to show you the inner workings of JET with this installation as an example.

Friday, July 4. 2008

Okay, before working with the Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit we have to prepare some stuff. We need systems, a network (as fast as possible to reduce installation time, but even 10 MBit/s would suffice), operating system ISOs etc.

Friday, July 4. 2008

Now we get to the tool that will be the centerpoint of the whole tutorial: The Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit. This tool was started as an internal tool by some project engineers to make their job easier. And with the time a really mighty tool was born.

Friday, July 4. 2008

Sometimes you donīt to do a new install of a system. You just want to clone a system. For example think about a webserver farm. Letīs assume you have thirty of them. Youīve configured one and now you want to distribute this config to all of your system. Youīve tuned the system extensivly, you changed configurations throughout all components. And you donīt want to do this 29 times again.

Friday, July 4. 2008

I will not describe the exact process of native Jumpstart in itīs multitude of configuration files you have to modify, as the Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit will do this job for us, but itīs important to know some of the important internals of Jumpstart. I will describe the most important files. There are varius others like /etc/ethers or the dhcp server configuration, but as you donīt touch them manually even with the native configuration of Jumpstart i wonīt describe them here.